I Asked 1,000 Americans to Name a British City Other than London

I asked 1000 Americans to name a British City OTHER than London. That’s not the opening line to a joke or a round on Family Fortunes. I really did…

I received an email over the weekend from Google with a promo code to try out Google Consumer Surveys. So, without really thinking of any serious or practical use of it (and struggling to get it one launched with a UK target audience, so having to run it in the USA), I decided to ask 1000 Americans to name a British City other than London.

I live in Manchester… so really, what I actually wanted to find out is how well known my own beloved city is. So, just for fun, here we go…

Top 10 UK Cities (Outside London) According to 1000 Americans

Anyway, here are the top 10 answers and the percentage of people who said them. In some cases, these include misspelt variants, as you can see from the raw data download available at the end of this post.

Liverpool (15% of respondents answered ‘Liverpool’)

Manchester (12%)

Leeds (4.7%)

Cambridge (3.7%)

Bristol (3.6%)

Wales (3.6%)

Oxford (3.0%)

Birmingham (2.4%)

Bath (2.3%)

Paris (1.9%) – Yes, Paris

This isn’t the only contest in which Manchester has played second fiddle to Liverpool in the past couple of days. Sniffle, sulk, whine. But perhaps the biggest surprise of the top 10 (apart from the fact that 19 people thought Paris is in a British city and 36 people thought Wales is) is how few people answered ‘Birmingham.’ Could it be the football influence of Liverpool and Manchester? 1% of respondents also said ‘Chelsea.’

[Update] MaddingtonBear, quite rightly suggested over on Reddit that Liverpool is actually likely to feature thanks to the Beatles… I didn’t think of that but it’s correct, I’d imagine!

Full List of Responses

Here’s the full list of answers in all its glory (with misspellings, ‘I don’t knows’ and New Yorks).

Raw Data

If anyone would like the spreadsheet with the full 1000 responses split by demographic, age, gender, salary and state, you can download it here.

Updates

[5th September 2013] – Google Consumer Surveys does now work in the UK for anyone looking to use this for a UK audience survey.